Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Forecasting future innovations often misses the groundbreaking ideas that disrupt the norm.
P. J. O'Rourke highlights the paradox in predicting innovation, suggesting that the most likely future advancements are often incremental improvements rather than truly revolutionary changes. In essence, true innovation tends to come from unexpected sources or ideas that fall outside conventional expectations.
Themes
InnovationPredictionCreativityDisruption
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about future technologies, one might say, 'As P. J. O'Rourke once noted, predicting innovation can be tricky.'
More from P. J. O'Rourke
All quotes βAlways read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
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I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
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Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.
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